«Très loin dans le réel». Sulla recitazione di Isabelle Huppert

This paper aims to investigate and analyze Isabelle Huppert’s acting style. Huppert inspired the imaginary of several authors of modern cinema (like Maurice Pialat or Claude Chabrol) to the point that she became to be known as a kind of‘dir-actress’, guarantor of the quality of experimental projects such as those of Guillaume Nicloux (Valley of Love, 2015) or Ursula Meier (Home, 2008). Since her early performances, Huppert has highlighted a sophisticated and personal acting style, based on a very rare balance between incarnation and abstraction: «Huppert’s face – Jean-Luc Godard said – is a thinking face». Directors like Michael Haneke or Marco Bellocchio film this face to evoke not the presence of the character, but the echo of his absence. Opacity, ambiguity and dissonance are the main stylistic traits of an actress crossing the boundaries of naturalism and forcing the limits of the threshold that unites (and separates) the actor and the director, the model and the artist, the body and the gaze.